


Becalmed

by storyqdayx5d



Category: Den lille Havfrue | The Little Mermaid - Hans Christian Andersen
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-07-03
Updated: 2012-08-15
Packaged: 2017-11-09 02:04:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 7,838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/450044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/storyqdayx5d/pseuds/storyqdayx5d
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The littlest mermaid was, for a long time, no different from her sisters except for that she bruised more easily...She dragged the sailors down, held them until they stopped struggling, and ate their hearts, their skin, their strange lungs that could not sustain them under water. This was natural for mermaids and she did not question it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Of the drowned arm which lifts the water drop

**Author's Note:**

> This is something that started in April as part of Poem-a-Day (an exercise I started to get me writing after mooooonths of whining about all the not writing I was doing). Poem-a-Day in April became Prose-a-Day in May and then 1000 Words-a-Day in June. Then it spiraled to become this story. 
> 
> This chapter was set off by [this gorgeous piece of art](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Jhh0ttrNgS0/T8gYDOI_ytI/AAAAAAABvo8/8MKn7nV5bfQ/s1600/22_rhinegold_rackham_color.jpg).
> 
> The title is from the poem "The Great Ocean" by Pablo Neruda.

They were identical although they were all of different ages. They each had skin the color of sea foam at sunset and when they dived among the waves and danced there, they were nearly invisible, indistinguishable from the water that was their home. They liked the sharp sting of the stone against their skin, the rushing of salt in the wound, the scars that rose there, the bruises that formed on their living, vital bodies, that bloomed in blues and purples and faded into yellows, greens, browns. Their hair was the color of the rocks they were dashed against, reckless and undeniable as the storms that pulled sailors under. They ate the flesh of forgotten sailors and learned the memories of men that way, and later sang tales so familiar that even on nights when ships were becalmed, the bodies of men would crash beneath the surface, seeking the voices that called them.

The littlest mermaid was, for a long time, no different from her sisters except for that she bruised more easily. She danced with them on the surface and mocked the half-formed, tail-less bodies of the men they beckoned and devoured amidst thunder and flashing light. She decorated herself in the same starfish-shaped bruises, she did not cry out when swimming among the burning wreckage even though she felt the skin on her back seared and bubbling. She dragged the sailors down, held them until they stopped struggling, and ate their hearts, their skin, their strange lungs that could not sustain them under water. This was natural for mermaids and she did not question it. She laughed with her sisters and sang with them and reveled in every storm.

She ate their eyes, though, which was not so usual - they were the same texture as jellyfish, a dish which most of her sister abhorred and did not eat if they could help it. She hoped that by consuming their eyes, she might be able to witness the dead mens’ dreams. (She never did.)

She wondered about them, these human men who were so fragile in the water. This her sisters never did. Men were nothing more than prey to them, but the littlest mermaid pondered what such frail creatures were doing on the sea when they were so ill-equipped to survive it. They must be very brave, she thought, or very foolish, and she couldn’t determine which was true, not even with their heart’s blood on her tongue. 

“Why do they come to the sea when they know how dangerous it is?” she asked her oldest sister, who was fashioning a necklace out of the teeth of a hammerhead shark. She had just returned from a hunt, had killed the mad beast that had been picking off some of the youngest citizens of their kingdom. Una’s ribs were broken and there was a wound that stretched from her belly to the raised green bumps of her spine. The shark had grabbed her and shook her like a toy, but mermaids were harder to kill than that and Una was unconcerned. The little fish who had followed the shark around before he had been killed, the cleaner fish who sought out his protection and the food that dropped from his mouth, switched their allegiance and now hovered around the wound, cleaning it with sycophantic kisses and murmuring her praise. She waved them away, annoyed, and fastened the shark tooth necklace.

“Who knows? Who cares?” Una looked up at the surface. The shimmering light of the moon made its way to them without obstruction; there was no ships out on the sea tonight. She sighed, disappointed. “We haven’t had a good shipwreck in while,” she said. 

The littlest mermaid was, privately, glad. She wanted to catch a human unaware, to speak to him, to ask him questions. This could never happen during a shipwreck, of course, because her sisters were always around her, keening in the high winds, the bloodlust and the hunt driving them as mad as the hammerhead shark. She knew that, during a shipwreck, she would sing and hunt with them, and the human men would die beneath the waves again, as they always did.

“What are you thinking?” her sister asked suspiciously, catching the littlest mermaid’s chin beneath her strong, rough fingers, and turning her to look into her eyes.

“Nothing, Una. Just thinking of shipwrecks, and of feasting.” Una released her chin but did not seem convinced. Her sharp teeth bit down on her lip and her eyes narrowed. The littlest mermaid stared up at the surface where the pale moon swayed, the edges of its full shape waving steadily. It would be a calm night up there. “It has been so dull, lately,” she said, her voice wistful. Una grunted her agreement.

“Don’t worry, Octavia. There will be another storm soon, or at least another ship to charm sailors from. Fools,” she sneered, “they will always return to the sea. It is not theirs, and still they return.”

“Fools,” Octavia echoed, swimming away as Una began to clean her weapons of the shark’s blood.

—

Before she came of age, Octavia had wanted nothing more than to be just like her sisters. She was the youngest hatched, and she followed them everywhere, crying each time one of them was allowed, for the first time, to swim to the surface for her first hunt while she remained behind with their grandmother.

“You must be still, child,” the old witch said as Octavia, in a rage, destroyed all the trinkets in her room. “In a hundred years, you will be of age, and then you will swim with them to the surface.”

“A hundred years!” Octavia wailed.

“A hundred years is not so long to a mermaid,” the witch said. She smiled wryly, “None of your sisters were so wild to get to the surface. You are a strange child.”

“I’m not strange!” Octavia snapped, picking up her toy spear and poking half-heartedly at her grandmother’s side. The witch batted it away calmly and held out her arms. Octavia swam to her reluctantly and allowed her grandmother to comb her fingers through her hair.

“What do they do up there anyway?” Octavia ask mulishly.

“Hunt.”

“Hunt what?”

“Men.”

“Why?”

“Because,” her grandmother said simply. “They do not belong here.”


	2. She came all of a sudden, newly unleashed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Octavia had watched those eyes change subtly from living to dead. She remembered every pair. It was always a curious change, and one that Octavia was sure she would never understand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "We have not immortal souls, we shall never live again: but, like the green sea-weed, when once it has been cut off, we can never flourish more. Human beings, on the contrary, have a soul which lives forever, lives after the body has been turned to dust. It rises up through the clear, pure air beyond the glittering stars. As we rise out of the water, and behold all the land of   
> the earth, so do they rise to unknown and glorious regions which we shall never see."   
> -The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen
> 
> The title of this chapter is taken from Pablo Neruda's "Ode to the Storm."

Octavia had been of age for nearly a decade, and had gone on many hunts. At first she was as vicious as her sisters, or more so, seeking to prove herself and make up for lost time. Where her sisters would sometimes let a man go, leave him for the gulls or the sharks or the sun on the boiling sea, Octavia more often opted to bring him down beneath the waves and stare into his eyes as he drowned. She liked to watch the shock of his realization that there were creatures like her in the sea, but more beautiful, and stronger, and strange, than he had ever dared to imagine. To him, Octavia and her sisters were a myth, perhaps, incorporeal voices on the wind, stories with which to frighten young children, or charms to carve into the wood of their ships, sea-nymphs and goddesses, superstitions from which to entreat blessings at the start of every voyage. They set more in store by the albatross, Octavia thought, than the mermaids they carved into their ships. But the albatross was nothing but an impartial seabird, and it was her image, and those of her sisters, being used so carelessly to guide and guard ships; her image that blessed the nets that dropped down into the coral nurseries or pillaged the fields of oysters and their pearls, stealing riches from the kingdom to glint, useless, at the necks of human females and on the cuffs and jackets of their mates. 

Octavia had, perhaps, brought down princes. She would never know, and mostly didn’t care, if she had sent kingdoms above into disarray by her actions. She didn’t know how many dancing ladies she had rendered widows, forced to trade in their watercolor dresses for gowns of pitch and smoke. There was a time, years ago, when there had been several shipwrecks a week for months. Octavia and her sisters had been busy, and they had shared the spoils with the rest of the kingdom, had thrown wild celebrations every night they triumphed over the invasion that the human men had not even known they were staging.  Afterwards, they had left the bodies to wash ashore as a warning, and gradually the ships decreased. Octavia, swimming up to the surface to haunt one of the nearby ports (always under the cover of darkness – humans had harpoons that not even whales were immune to and mermaids, though strong, had on occasion been slain by these weapons) had heard the sailors speaking of a curse, blaming their captains for allowing a bleeding woman on board one of the ships to be transported to a neighboring city, blaming one another for slaying an albatross or scoffing at their good luck charms and trinkets.

When the vessels sank, the wooden mermaids were cut free and positioned about the city. The kingdom’s artists and sculptors set to work modifying them, adding the green ridges of the mermaid’s spines, the slashed gills at the neck and ribs, the scars along their torso, chipping away at the scales of their tails to reflect what had been lost in battle. Octavia’s grandmother, the oldest mermaid in the realm and the most powerful, murmured spells over the giant talismans and the pristine wooden maidens, now bruised and battered and blessed, scowled hatefully up at the surface.

The kingdom had since reverted to its usual ways before the hunts. Octavia and her sisters protected the borders not from sailors but from the mad sharks. They welcomed troupes of visiting dolphins and porpoises, and schools of erudite tuna and the knightly swordfish. Her sisters, who had been hunters much longer than Octavia, were bored and bloodthirsty, often challenging the master swordfish to duels out in the square, to the amusement of older, more sedate citizens, and to the delight of the children. 

Octavia spent time away from her sisters now, secluded in her own garden, swimming among the fallen bones of men, studying their skulls and remembering the eyes that each skull had housed in all their curious colors: blues as light as the morning sky or as dark as the moonless sea, green like foam or forest, brown as wet sand or flecked with gold like dry dunes in the distance. Octavia had watched those eyes change subtly from living to dead. She remembered every pair. It was always a curious change, and one that Octavia was sure she would never understand. Mermaids’ eyes were always red, a jarring contrast to their sea foam skin and slate hair. They lived for centuries and were rarely killed. The oldest became foam on the sea. Others died suddenly and without warning and were left wherever they had drifted in the city, for the fish to pick at their bones and perhaps for a loved one to bring flowers. 

Octavia swam to her grandmother, who was old and nearly blind, bent over a cauldron that was glowing purple and green – a mixture mostly of kelp and young coral. Her grandmother peered at a small pearl, rolled it in her fingers, and dropped into the mix. It pulsed white, blinding, once, twice, three times, and then simmered down again, lilac.

“Is that my Octavia?” said the witch.

“Yes, grandmother.”

“What have you brought me?”

Octavia held up the skull that she still carried. Her grandmother took it, running one crooked finger along the eye sockets and counting the teeth. 

“The skull of a prince.” She cackled suddenly and tossed it into the cauldron. Octavia stifled a cry as the liquid bubbled blood red. This time it did not revert to its lilac hue. 

“Why did you do that?” she demanded.

“Be careful, little one,” the witch answered. She swam away from the cauldron to run her hands along the shelves that lined the cave, dislodging bottles filled with all manner of strange things – tentacles and sharks' teeth, pearls of various colors and sizes, sometimes even letters written by humans, the bottles stoppered and the parchment dry. These, Octavia remembered, were the most powerful – they contained bits of the souls of the humans above, love letters poured out to lost sailors, written by grieving wives. Mermaids had no souls – that she had learned from her grandmother long ago – and so the barest glimpse of a human soul could make even an ordinary spell dangerous, lending a power that not even the old witch could understand or fully master. Octavia had known this for a long time, too, but rarely thought of it, although she thought that their souls might account for the strange change she witnessed again and again in the eyes of the sailors she killed. Human souls were volatile and the old witch did not often use them. Now, eyeing the boiling blood potion, Octavia shuddered and felt, quite inexplicably, a sinking sense of dread.

 


	3. The Sea-slug and the treasure chest

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “This is the second time you’ve interrupted my nap,” he said. “What in the name of kelp are you making such a racket for?”

Octavia was not a sorceress like her grandmother, who trafficked in pearls and scales and the bones of men. But she was intuitive enough that the crimson potion made her uneasy. La Sola, which is what they called their grandmother out of respect for her old age and her knowledge of spells, had never been sharp with Octavia before. Now she had all but snapped at her to  _be careful_ ; of what, Octavia couldn’t yet imagine.

The old witch was just that, though – old. Almost ancient. A film like the underside of a manta ray, sickly and vulnerable, was starting to grow over her red eyes. Her hands were curved now and her fingers, which had once been so delicate and graceful, were rickety and trembled when they tried to unstopper bottles of ingredients. Old enough that one day, Octavia thought, she might swim to the cave to find it empty but for foam, La Sola nothing more than a memory and a weak one at that.

Without souls, mermaids found it difficult to remember their dead, especially the ones that became foam and dispersed throughout the sea. It was why they had no graveyards, no ceremonies. If a mermaid died relatively young, her bones would lie in the city and perhaps a wreath of flowers would be woven for her, but no words would be spoken and even her family would eventually forget her. Mermaids could not cry, and so they did not mourn.

 They keened, however, when a child was taken by a shark, for mermaids did not nest often and their offspring they considered sacred. Octavia and her sisters were the some of the youngest in recent memory, except for the two the hammerhead had recently stolen and devoured. It was part of the reason why her sisters were so restless for a storm – anything, anything to take the kingdom’s mind off of the children who had died.

La Sola was old and soon she would become foam. Octavia knew this suddenly and with a certainty that almost made her turn back to the cave. Instead she swam on through the quiet city streets. She felt that if she returned to the cave now, La Sola would die, and it would somehow be Octavia’s fault. She wondered who would take La Sola’s place, because as long as there were mermaids, there was a witch to heal them and to bless them and to help them come of age. Terza, Octavia’s third oldest sister, spent much of her time with La Sola – any time she could find, really, when Una wasn’t making them patrol. It would probably be Terza. Octavia was sure it wouldn’t be her, and was glad. Magic made her anxious – she didn’t have the mind to understand it or the patience to learn and no creature under the sea could make her want to involve herself with human souls. She thought of the eyes of mortal men, how they changed like a light went out when they died, like the shadow of a ship covering the sun, how their bodies seemed to empty, and they became meat to be consumed, and she shivered. The corpses of mermaids looked, in death, just as they had in life: their scales were as bright, their scars as vivid, their hair as susceptible to the flow of the water where they fell. Their decay was little more than a decoration, a sculpture that fed the lesser subjects until there were only bones. Octavia thought perhaps mermaids shared this in common with mortal men – becoming food – but the thought made her uncomfortable, and she tried to find some way to distract herself.

She decided not to join her sisters in their bouts with the master swordfish, although she could perhaps have used the practice. She half-heartedly joined a drunken hunt Una organized at the kingdom’s borders, but children had been already been avenged, and Octavia much preferred to patrol alone and not to dwell on their deaths. She found herself swimming by old shipwrecks, the rotting wooden beams all picked clean, the sails stolen and hung in windows or torn and woven into satchels. She sat on top of a rusting chest and picked glumly at the lock which, even after centuries, still held the box closed. Pieces of rust stuck to her fingers and she licked them idly, the taste reminiscent of blood. She wondered what was inside the chest. It occurred to her suddenly that she might bring it to La Sola - perhaps she would know how to open it. Then she thought with a shudder of the blood potion and resolved to open the chest on her own.

She swam outside the shipwreck and found a heavy rock. A slug was napping underneath it. He watched her wearily as she hefted the rock, then rolled his eyes and slowly slid away to find another hiding place. Octavia tossed the rock from one hand to the other, too intent on her task to apologize. She swam back into the ship and dashed the rock against the rusted lock, heedless of her own fingers, the nails that broke and bled. She bit her lip hard and kept slamming the rock against the chest, again, again, again. As she worked, she didn’t think of what she might find. Her goal was simply to open the chest.

The slug who had been napping slid into view.

“What are you doing?” he asked, exasperated. Octavia held the rock high above her head with both hands, bringing it down as forcefully as she could.

“Mermaid!” he bellowed. Octavia stopped, shocked that a creature of this realm would dare to address her so. She peered at the creature, who was completely unremorseful.

“This is the second time you’ve interrupted my nap,” he said. “What in the name of kelp are you making such a racket for?”

“I want to open the chest.”

“Clearly,” he sneered. “Why?”

Octavia didn’t answer except to narrow her eyes at him.

“Don’t think you can intimidate me, mermaid,” he grumbled, but nodding his head stiffly at her in respect. “If I open it for you, will you cease causing such an abominable ruckus?”

“How could  _you_  open it?” Octavia asked dubiously. The slug exhaled a long-suffering breath and rolled his eyes.

“Mermaids,” he muttered to himself. “You’re strong, so you rely on brute strength. That’s iron, sweet cheeks. You’re not going to be able to pound it open. Or maybe you will, but I’ve already got a migraine.”

“Well?”

“Outta my way.” Octavia didn’t move. “Very well, but I must warn you that I secrete an acid that’ll eat straight through your pretty tail down to the bone. It should take care of iron quite nicely. And  _quietly,_ ” he added.

Octavia was still doubtful, but she moved reluctantly out of his way.

 _“Thank you,_ ” he said snootily.

She crossed her arms and watched him as he settled onto the lock and closed his eyes.


	4. The sisters come of age

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They swam up, all seven of them, leaving Octavia behind and returning with wooden mermaids, with sails, with the pale blue bodies of drowned men and with chests full of whatever those men, alive, had loved.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "When the sisters rose, arm-in-arm, through the water in this way, their youngest sister would stand quite alone, looking after them, ready to cry, only that the mermaids have no tears, and therefore they suffer more."  
> -Hans Christian Andersen

The slug stayed there so long that Octavia was beginning to think she had been taken in by the unpleasant creature. Each time she made a frustrated noise or moved toward him, though, he opened one reproachful eye and settled more firmly on top of the lock. Octavia sighed and sat across from him, her chin on her knuckles. The longer he took, the more still he became doing whatever it was that sea slugs do to break into iron-bound chests, the more eager Octavia was to see what the chest held. She wondered what humans could have that could possibly be so valuable that they would keep it guarded so carefully, and bring it with them as they travelled the wide sea. She wondered where these humans had come from – the land that was within an hour’s journey from the kingdom? The mortal who had kept this trunk – was he leaving that land and going elsewhere? Or did he journey from some land far away? And what did their lands look like, anyway, those strange, slow, two-legged creatures, so frail and awkward in the water and moving so fitfully on their ships, all jerking and tossed about?

She remembered quite distinctly each time one of her older sisters had gone up to the surface on the day they came of age. They returned with stories for her that she worried like a piece of flesh caught in her teeth. She made them tell their stories again and again, until they chased her out of their rooms in exasperation, and she had committed them to memory. Una went up on the night of a violent storm with her hair in knots all down her back, her face shining with wild glee. She had been tossed about on the waves and had taken the lives of three men. She returned to them gloating, her red eyes bright and burning, with blood on her lips.

Undina, the second sister, had gone up as the sun was setting. Second in age and also in daring, she swam into the river that cut through the city nearest to their kingdom. She did not mind the muck and the murkiness, although it made her angry that humans treated the river that way. She hid under a bridge until night fell and then called to the young boys who were late on their way home. She killed three of them and used their scarves to tie them together and brought them back to the kingdom as a treat. Octavia had felt sad when she saw them, although she was careful to hide this from her sisters – of all of them, Una and Undina were the cruelest. But the boys were small, the same size as Octavia had been at the time, their soft hands were unscarred, their foreheads smooth, their teeth small and white; they were nothing like the men who sailed the ships and ravished the coral and carved false mermaids from wood.

Terza swam into the bay when she came of age to listen beside a ship on which humans were celebrating. A young human woman was dressed in white and was being spun by her mate: a wedding, then. Terza watched the red sun on the face of the couple, shining and spinning on their agile feet. She waited as the sun set and the party got drunker and more rambunctious. When they had at last retired to sleep off the liquor, Terza began to sing. How funny Una would find it if she called the young human away from the side of his beloved on the night of their wedding, to dive with her beneath the waves and never to return.

But the young bride was the one who answered the song, walking out in the moonlight in her sheer night gown, leaping with a small splash into the water. Terza was surprised and almost afraid – she had never interacted with a human female before. Shivering in the cold water, her blond hair gone dark in the wet and plastered to her face, the girl smiled at Terza, and Terza for all her bloodlust and her cruelty and all the spells she had learned to end a life, could not kill the girl. She swam with her to the shallows and held her at arm’s length, but never beneath the surface. The girl asked Terza to teach her the song she had been singing, and Terza did, kissing the girl's lips into the correct shape for the strange vowel sounds of Terza's own language, her hands wandering over the torso that was so like her own, and curiously over and between the legs that Terza had always mocked and reviled. When the sun rose in the morning, Terza was almost caught beached, and she returned home with blisters on her sea foam skin, and Una berated her for weeks on end.

Marisabel was shy and stole up to the surface on the eve of her coming of age. She did not seek out ships or sailors but rather watched the empty sky – not even the moon was out that night. She floated on her back and was so still that there was hardly a ripple in the water around her; the stars reflected clearly in the sea. She told no one but Terza and Octavia what she had done that night, not even La Sola, and sometimes she still went up to the surface on a still night to lose herself between sea and sky.

Rhodos, the fifth sister, disappeared from the kingdom the week before her birthday. When she returned, months later, she told them of how she had swam south as far as she could swim, until the waters were cold and slow moving. She had visited the kingdoms of the whales and the pale porpoises. She had been forced to breach the surface late, because it was almost impossible to find a scrap of sea not covered by ice. The upside-down kingdoms of the mer-people there were as blue as a morning sky, as grey as a dolphin's back, and above the surface they were cold and hard as diamonds. There were ships in the distance, Rhodos said, but they stayed as far as they could from the ice.

The sixth and seventh sisters were twins and their coming of age had occurred during a storm, like Una’s. They swam up, all seven of them, leaving Octavia behind and returning with wooden mermaids, with sails, with the pale blue bodies of drowned men and with chests full of whatever those men, alive, had loved.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


	5. shipshape box of tricks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “What is it a picture of?” the slug asked, exasperated.
> 
> “A man I killed,” Octavia told him, looking down at the picture in her hands again. “The first man I killed.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title of this chapter comes from Neruda's "Autumn Testament."

"You’re brooding,” the slug said, interrupting her thoughts. She looked up at him. He was finally stirring. He made a sound like a belch and shifted, watching her with a defiant expression. He slithered down off the lock and Octavia started forward with eager fingers.

“Hold it,” the slug snapped. Octavia, her hands just inches away from the lock, froze.

“Grab a piece of kelp or something,” the slug grumbled, hopping off the chest and settling down by her tail, careful not to touch her. “You’ll burn your royal fingers otherwise, and probably have me executed.”

“I wouldn’t do that,” Octavia murmured, distracted. She picked up a long piece of kelp that had gotten stuck to one of the splinters of the side of the ship and tugged the lock. It broke off easily in her hand and she tossed it away and opened the trunk.

“Excuse me if I don’t really trust you,” the slug said darkly. “All blood and violence, you mermaids, and poking around where you don’t belong.”

“What was that?” Octavia said sharply, turning momentarily to look at him.

“Nothing, nothing. Pillage away.”

 

The chest was filled with all manner of strange things. Books, mostly, the ink of their pages diluted and illegible, not that Octavia was very familiar with the language. Some of the pictures and etchings were still clear, however, and showed humans dancing, and eating, and laughing. Of the letters that could be made out, there was no uniformity – some were large and straight, some were slanted, some drifted off into ridiculous flourishes. A journal, Octavia thought, suddenly and decisively. She knew she was right, but wasn't sure how she knew: Mermaids kept no records, not individually, at least. Their scribes carved the walls of the palace with images of the royalty that had lived there, but those grooves were wiped away with time. La Sola kept a scroll of spells scratched in her mercurial, indecipherable hand: this was as old as the kingdom itself. The journal from the chest shared some similarities: the temperamental quality of the hand that wrote it, the varying sizes of letters, the way words were blotted out and criss-crossed and turned into crude sketches without any sort pattern or plan. Octavia wondered who it had belonged to and thought, suddenly, of swimming up to the surface just before dawn and placing it onto the beach, tossing it so that it would be out of the reach of the surf, to see who would come to claim it. She wished she could read their language and know what was written here, and if the human who had written it had been one of the ones she and her sisters had taken. Octavia couldn’t explain why she was so curious, and she was glad it did not occur to the slug to ask her.

There were other things in the box as well. Pictures of humans that were not like the etchings in the journal. They were in black and white and looked fantastically lifelike, and preserved, mostly, by being encased in glass. There were letters in bottles: green bottles, blue bottles, brown ones, and Octavia took extra care with these. She was not a witch, she didn’t have the power that La Sola or Terza did, but the bottles made her skin prickle with warning, made her hearts beat triple time and her stomach clench the way it did on a hunt for a shark. Something felt like it was crawling along her skin as she pushed the bottles aside, uncomfortably reminded of the keening that was done only for the slaughtered mer-children. She didn’t quite know how to place it or describe it, so she ignored it and was careful not to touch the bottles again, rummaging instead through layers and layers of black fabric until she found one more picture at the bottom of the chest in almost perfect condition. She gasped.

“What is it?” the slug demanded, stretching his eyes as high as he could to try to get a better look.

Octavia picked up the picture and examined it. It was of a mortal man, not as young as some of the ones that she and her sisters had sang down into the sea, but not old. Octavia recognized him although his face in the picture was quiet different. He wasn’t smiling – none of the black-and-white pictures contained smiling humans and of the sisters, only Terza had seen a mortal smile in real life, and that was at the wedding she observed – but his brows were even and his face relaxed, if stern. His hair was dark in the picture as it had been in real life; the lack of color made it impossible to ascertain the exact shade of his skin, but Octavia remembered it well: brown and burnished red, from many days at sea.

“What’s that?” the slug asked again. She felt a sharp sting against the upper portion of her tail and saw him butting his head there impatiently.

“It’s a picture,” Octavia said softly. His eyes were the same in the picture, and not. He was alive, and also not alive, his face was flat and closed, not animated with fear, with rage, with unwilling wonder as she dragged him down and buried her knife in his heart, her teeth in his neck and sharp against his lips. He did not cry out, Octavia remembered that. He did not whine or beg like so many of the others and she had very nearly hesitated, until Una had shouted at her to  _do it_. She supposed she had no choice, and she had not regretted it, nor any of the other kills she had made; she had hardly thought of it since then, in fact. And yet now, holding his image before her, she felt the same grudging respect for him that had caused her to hesitate, the man who was her first kill, who did not scream or sob when she pulled him under, not even when she began to devour him. He had fought, yes – she had a scar over one eyebrow that disappeared into her dark hair that he had made with quick fists and broken glass – but she had been able to overpower him. The sea is unfriendly to mortal men: he could not fight it and her at the same time. How curious it was now that she should find his image here. She supposed this was the very ship that had sank on the eve of her coming of age. There were so many scattered about the kingdom, and that night had been so wild and full of blood, and many like it had followed, that Octavia had lost track.

“Of what?”

Octavia started and looked at the slug, uncomprehending.

“What is it a picture of?” the slug asked, exasperated.

“A man I killed,” Octavia told him, looking down at the picture in her hands again. “The first man I killed.”

She didn’t see the slug shudder and swim again silently, one wary look at her before he left. She never saw him again.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My favorite verses from the poem "Autumn Testament"
> 
> HE DISCUSSES HIS ENEMIES AND SHARES OUT HIS INHERITANCE:  
> I have been torn to pieces  
> by spiteful poaching beasts  
> which seemed invincible.  
> I got used in the sea  
> to eating pips of shade,  
> strange specimens of amber,  
> and swam into lost cities  
> with underwear and armour  
> in such a way they kill you  
> and you succumb to laughter.
> 
> And also a part of the verse: THE POET ENDS HIS BOOK BY TALKING ABOUT HIS VARIED METAMORPHOSES AND BY CONFIRMING HIS FAITH IN POETRY
> 
> While things make up their minds for me,  
> I leave my will and testament,  
> my shipshape box of tricks,  
> in order that, with many readings,  
> no one can ever learn too much  
> if not the never-ending motion  
> of a man clear and confused,  
> a man of rain and happiness,  
> energetic and autumn-bound.


	6. We circle silently about the wreck

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A thought came unbidden to Octavia that this would be her last hunt, her final night at sea. The surface above was in ruins, crashing, flashing, the water towering above the mortals' ships in high walls of white. Beneath it was eerily calm; the sea sang to Octavia of change.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title of this chapter comes from Adrienne Rich's ["Diving Into the Wreck"](http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15228)

Octavia returned only a few times to the sunken chest before she was forever banished from the sea. She sat among the scattered treasures – the pictures safely encased in glass, the journal that she touched gently, gently, careful to make sure the pages did not float away, the bottles that she avoided for the creeping sensation that spread along her skin. She draped herself in black cloth and felt an inexplicable weight settle on her naturally buoyant body. She did not know how to classify what it was she felt. If she had been human, it would have been easy – it was called sadness. It was a strange, empathic sensation, like one feels when passing a graveyard. (This is why humans hold their breath when passing graveyards: to keep the sadness and longing of the dead at bay. Mermaids, on the other hand, do not have the ability to cry, and they do not mourn; they have no souls, and they do not understand death, except the deaths of their young ones – and it is not so much _death_ they fear, then, as it is the risk of vanishing, for when the young ones die, what mermaids will be there to replace them?)

It had been weeks of a frustratingly calm sea. Una had locked herself in the castle’s highest tower and kept a weather eye out at all times for a storm, but there was no storm forthcoming. The twins kept guard outside of her door, bickering and giggling to each other. Undina had left with the swordfish on a campaign of some sort; Una was too bored and lethargic to be tempted to follow, or even to learn their mission. Terza had vanished, as she always did, into the cave where La Sola lived, day in, day out, weaving spells with the old witch. The cave frequently emitted the forbidding crimson glow that caused Octavia to shudder as she swam by. She saw her other sisters, sometimes, throughout the city, but she was careful not to establish any sort of routine when leaving to visit the shipwreck and the chest. She did not want to share that with them yet, if ever, and could not risk being followed. She realized, suddenly, that she missed the strange little slug who had helped her to open the chest. It occurred to her, now that he was gone, how little she had to do with her sisters, especially now in a time of calm.

Octavia would not have minded if the calm would last a bit longer. She spent hours staring at the face of the man she killed, tracing his features with her fingertips. She ran her tongue along her pointed teeth and tried to remember the taste of him, but this she could not recall. She had feasted on the flesh of many men, and had never thought to differentiate between them. She remembered the taste of their fear, of their panic, she remembered their voices high on the wind and the smell of them – they went days without bathing on their ships; they were pungent, they smelled the way she imagined the dry earth must taste.

After the slug helped her open the chest, however, the calm was short lived. Una’s wish was granted, and a storm again boiled on the sea. Una shot to the surface on the first night, and cackled at the ships in the distance. The twins begged to be allowed to swim out to greet them, but Una forbade it.

“We shall wait for them to come to us,” she ordered, and the twins, put out, stood guard once more outside her door. Una, much more cheerful now, waited happily in her room. She sharpened all her knives twice and stood with her back straight, her palms resting patiently on the ledge of the window, her face pointed in the direction of the ships. Octavia was worried – where Una had been a listless form floating about from wall-to-wall, she now stood straight and ready, her long muscles quivering with energy, her eyes dark and eager and fixed on the moon above and anticipating the shadow that would cover it once the ships were within sight. Octavia could taste the storm on the water, heavy and warm, she could see flashes of lightening as they flickered down to the surface, could hear, if she swam far enough away from the city, the thunder and the wail of the wind and waves.

The sea turned purple the night the storm struck. Una led her sisters – all present except for Undina –straight up to belly of the ship, biting her lip so hard that it bled.

“Show me your knives, sisters!” Una commanded.  Octavia hesitated – Una was never much one for rousing speeches. It went unspoken that they should drag all the men down and let none survive – she wondered if her sister had become somewhat unhinged by the long calm. The twins pulled out their knives eagerly, their tales flicking in agitation. They lunged at each other, attempting the draw blood, but froze, wobbling where they floated, at the unforgiving scowl on Una’s face. Octavia held out her own knife, the blade a soft orange of coral and the hilt made of pale bone, in loose fingers. She watched as Una drew her own blade across her uppermost heart and then across the palm of her hand, squeezing her own blood into the circle that they formed. She stuck out her tongue to taste it, her lips curled, her teeth bared. Octavia stole a glance at Terza, who looked troubled, but was imitating Una’s actions.

“Do it,” Una snapped at Octavia. Octavia complied, relishing and reviling the sting of the blade across her skin, the bite of her blood as it seeped from her palm. Una grasped hands with one of the twins; the circle became unbroken. Somewhere, lightning hit the water, and the water felt like it was beginning to boil in earnest. Terza stared up at the surface, and then back to Una’s wild, enraptured face. She did not look at Octavia.

“Let none survive,” Una said, her voice just above a whisper, a hymn and a spell under the crashing sea. She broke the circle and swam up so quickly that it seemed she disappeared. Octavia felt sick, but she could not explain why – she was usually excited before a hunt, but now she thought of the portrait of the man who was her first kill: the darkness of his hair and eyes, the way how, in her memories, he did not plead or weep. A thought came unbidden to Octavia that this would be her last hunt, her final night at sea. The surface above was in ruins, crashing, flashing, the water towering above the mortals' ships in high walls of white. Beneath it was eerily calm; the sea sang to Octavia of change.


	7. What drew us to the magnet of your dying?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Octavia thought of the eyes of the hammerhead shark, empty and cruel, and the song that Una was singing twisted like an ugly, hungry thing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title of this chapter comes from Stanley Kunitz's poem "The Wellfleet Whale"
> 
> "What drew us to the magnet of your dying?...  
> Toward dawn we shared with you  
> your hour of desolation,  
> the huge lingering passion   
> of your unearthly outcry,  
> as you swung your blind head  
> toward us and laboriously opened  
> a bloodshot, glistening eye,  
> in which we swam with terror and recognition."

The gravity of the ritual was lost on the twins, who dropped their hands as soon as Una was done with her prayer, her chant, her impromptu spell, whatever it was. Terza was troubled, sparing only one look at Octavia. Una’s eyes narrowed but she was distracted by the silliness of the twins.

“Enough!” she roared over the rolling of the sea, and the twins wobbled where they floated and looked at Una, guilty and alarmed. “You act like you’ve only got one brain among the two of you!” Una snapped, swinging at one of them with her knife and cutting her on the shoulder. The other cried out and pressed her hand over the wound.

“Una!” Octavia shouted. Terza put a hand on her arm in warning.

Una spun around. “ _All_ of them, sister,” was all she said, holding Octavia’s gaze until she lowered her eyes in deference. Octavia wondered why she was being singled out – Una must know about the chest in the sunken ship, and the time she had been spending among the relics of the man she’d killed on her coming of age. But that was just harmless curiosity, Octavia thought. Of course she was as excited about the hunt as any of her sisters.

The twins were watching her now, with identical wary expressions on their faces. They were still, and stillness fit them oddly; they seemed almost off-balance with it.  Solemn and staying well out of reach of Una’s arm, they floated, avoiding each other's eyes to keep from nervous giggling.

Una’s attention was now on the surface. She was watching the way the moonlight was being tossed through choppy waters to reach them, the light of so many stars crashing into the sea. The ships were closer now, much closer. The red light of their burning hulls was bleeding into the water. Una licked her lips and started to swim toward them. Her patience while the storm was building was gone and she was driven toward the promise of meat and death, spinning her knife in her hand. Without warning, she bolted ahead, and Octavia and the others hurried to keep up. Una broke the surface first, emerging from the sea bellowing a song, her eyes wide and dark. Octavia thought of the eyes of the hammerhead shark, empty and cruel, and the song that Una was singing twisted like an ugly, hungry thing. It was not meant to entice the sailors, but to reach them over the roar of the wind and the crash of the thunder; it was meant to frighten them even more than the ocean.

They began to leap over the sides of their ships, out of their minds with fear. They moved like fish startled from their schools, but with less grace and less quickly. Octavia pitied them, and was profoundly shocked at the sentiment.

Her sisters had scattered. The twins worked together as they always did, and Una worked alone, dragging two, three men down before Octavia had even found one, tearing into them even as they struggled. Terza, frightened by Una’s boundless cruelty (perhaps she had forgotten what Una could be like – it had, after all, been a long time since the last storm), whispered spells in the ears of the men she captured. It seemed to stun them and they hung limp on the water. She closed their eyes and carried them down with her. Marisabel and Rhodos worked quickly and efficiently, singing the men down from their ships when they refused to jump, slitting their throats and licking the blood clean from their knives, leaving the bodies tied together away from the burning ships and dragging them down afterwards. They laughed and leaped in the wind like dolphins, helping each other, keeping score of their kills and competing. Marisabel, usually shy and quiet, sang with abandon during a storm. Rhodos brought out her fierceness and her joy in the hunt.

Octavia treaded with her shoulders above the water, watching the men dive and fight and flail and drown. Her knife hung uselessly at her side, submerged. She looked from face to face – pale men and men with dark skin, men with long hair tangled in knots around their neck, black hair and red hair and pale yellow like sunlight on sand. She was not close enough to see any of their eyes, so instead she listened to them crying and praying and screaming. She could hear Una cackling above the din, leaning her face in, contorted and close enough to kiss the sailors, mauling them instead.

She felt something hit her, hard, from behind and spun around. She felt strong hands, one holding a blade, at her waist and pulling her down. It was Terza, with her eyes open wide and a cut on her cheek bleeding freely.

“What are you doing, Octavia?” Terza gasped. “Why aren’t you hunting? Why do you just watch?”

“I’m not –“

“You’ve not made one kill yet,” Terza said angrily. “You heard Una and you swore the blood oath. We are to kill them all. It has been too calm for too long, Octavia. Do not cross her.”

There were more ships on the sea this night than Octavia had remembered. They were fighting the storm and fighting each other and the ships were nearly all on fire. The circle that Marisabel and Rhodos were making was larger than Octavia had ever seen. She wondered what so many men were doing on the sea tonight and why they seemed intent on destroying each other – they were making it almost too easy. Octavia pulled in bodies that were already still and deposited them with the others. The circle was so large, it seemed obscene. She watched them kill each other, launching heavy balls of fire into the sides of their enemies’ ships, hardly aware of the mermaids who picked them off once they hit the water. Men dived screaming with their hair aflame. She grabbed at them and looked into their eyes, but every man she touched was already dead, his eyes wide and staring, the trace of his soul already gone. Octavia was disgusted. This was no hunt. It was a harvest.

 

 

 


End file.
